THE long hot summer has changed wee Robin Alderslowe’s face. After weeks of sunshine, his freckles have merged, his mum Lusi says. The ginger 13-year-old is now almost the same colour as the man he has come to protest against.

Robin is marching down Turnberry beach with Lusi and dad Danny at the head of a small procession. Behind him the volcanic plug of Ailsa Craig somehow floats in the July haze of the Firth of Clyde. Before him is a stream, the Milton Burn, and beyond that, the golf course owned and, today, occupied by the 45th President of the United States, Donald J Trump.

Robin is wearing a CND cap, a Greenpeace t-shirt and kilt. He is also carrying a set of junior bagpipes. “Hiya, I’m yer piper," he declares as his band joins a rag-tag group of protestors. ’“Geeza blast,” a woman wearing a F**k Trump top shouts. “You’ll hurt your ears,” Robin yells back.

Then he pops two orange buds in to his ears, puffs up his freckled cheeks and pipes up the old Scots tune “Castle Dangerous”.

“That’s appropriate, don’t you think," Danny, says as he nods to the other side of the stream. Its north bank is lined with unarmed officers in yellow high-viz vests, each two arms apart, from the shore right up half a kilometre or so to the red-roofed classic hotel Donald Trump, then a brash property developer rather than a divisive world leader, bought just four years ago.

Half way up this defensive line police have put up a scaffolding tower overlooking both links and shore. From here Police Scotland sharpshooters watch everything, including what is now some 50 protestors.

In the shallows, just offshore, a police rib boat bobs up and down. Further out looms a bigger law enforcement vessel.

Danny, a former Glasgow City Councillor for the Scottish Greens, isn’t here to watch this “ring of steel", as every one of the dozen or so newspaper reporters on the beach is calling this police presence. He’s hoping Trump will get a message that he – and his politics of division – is not welcome in Scotland. So is Lusi. “I think it helps America," she explains. “I know they didn’t vote for him but next time they have an election, hopefully they’ll remember this.”

Protestors reckon they can get to this president. “He has a fragile ego,” explains Ross Green, a Green MSP and old comrade of Alderslowe's. “Other leaders would shrug off protests. George Bush didn’t give a damn. Trump does. This gets under his skin.”

Janey Godley has already done so, right here at Turnberry. On the day after the Brexit vote – when the then candidate Trump visited his flagship Scottish property – the comedian stood behind him with a simple placard that became an internet meme. “I tell people it says ‘Trump is a runt’,” she laughs, holding a hand over the bottom part of the first letter of its last word of the same sign she showed the world in 2016.

Godley reckons she bugs Trump because she is a woman. “He doesn’t like breast-feeding, menstruating, any female fluids. How weird is that?”

“But men have fluids too”, someone says. "Aye, and Trump is covered in them," quips Godley.

Some men in red hats – did they say Make America Great Again, protestors ask each other – wander on to the fourth hole on the other bank of the Milton Burn. Godley, barefoot in the sand, starts screaming. “Trump, getae,” she yells. Everybody on the beach knows where she wants to the US President to go. And everybody on the beach, police officer, journalist, protestor, is glued to the course. It was a false alarm.

Sergeant Cat McConchie usually patrols the east end of Glasgow. She, like perhaps 5000 other officers across the country, has been drafted to police this visit and bigger protests in Glasgow and Edinburgh, at a bill of some £5 million. She has been liaising with Godley and the other protestors, making sure, she says, that everybody gets what they came for.

“If everybody is happy then we are happy," she smiles in the sun. “Me, I heard there was a wedding on at the hotel and I wish I could see the bride’s dress.”

There is no bride to see. Bit there is, eventually, a Trump.

Because in the early afternoon, comes a clatter of cameras. A cavalcade of golf buggies, a dozen in total, driving in close formation like a presidential motorcade, is speeding towards the fourth hole. Photographers and protestors are suddenly allies. “Is it him?" they ask each other. It is. Godley is gone. It is left to Greer to lead the chorus: “No Trump,” they chant. “No KKK, no Nazi USA."

A tall, obese golfer in a black windcheater and white cap – USA in blue on its side – strides on to the course. He cuts a now familiar figure. “Is he taking a shot?” protestors ask photographers with a clearer view through their long lenses, No, they answer, somebody is but it’s not Trump.

The President instead comes to a ridge overlooking the stream, behind a now thick line of police, and waves, twice, at a couple of scores of protestors calling him a Nazi. And, just a few choruses later, he is driven off, men in all-white jump suits and red baseball caps riding on the running board of his fleet of buggies.

“Job done,” declares another barefoot protestor, Laura Moodie, a charity worker from Galloway. “He’s a showman,” she declares. “He likes the attention. He wants to be noticed. He thinks all publicity is good publicity. But we got our message over.”

Greer is even happier. The MSP, his face reddened in the sunshine, is beaming. “We never thought we would get that,” he says of the Trumpian waves. “We know he will be up till three in the morning watching the cable news, seeing the protests, knowing that it is not true that he is popular in Scotland, whatever he says.

“There is no way he did not hear what we were saying. We have made it abundantly clear that his racism, his disrespect for climate change science and his misogyny is not welcome here. He has just played the most expensive round of golf in Scottish history but he couldn’t do it without hearing what we think of his neo-Nazism.”

And so the small protest by a little burn breaks up. The placards – including some made from a front page of the Sunday Herald’s sister paper, The National – are lowered. As campaigners wander back along the beach, a long hike, there is a change of the police guard. Sgt McConchie and her Scottish team goes.

New officers, with tell-tale English helmets, take their place. Some try to cross the stream using a sewage pipe like a makeshift bridge. The rusty metal structure is narrow. One or two officers gingerly edge across, like tightrope walkers. Most give up. A late-coming protestor takes a loud hailer and starts singing the theme tune for Benny Hill. A Basque – or Basquewegian, an EU national staying in Scotland, she asks not to be named, says, “I am just so distressed about what is happening in America, in Europe, with the rise of the far right.”

She keeps yelling at the police as the last of the protestors, nursing sunburns and sore throats, leave the beach. She shouts at the back of the police: “Who is paying for all this?”